Crystal Waters is widely notable as a musical icon to the LGBTQ+ community for hey contributions to house music with ’90s hits like “100% Pure Love” and “Gypsy Woman”. However, she’s far from the first musician in her lineage — or even the first one notable to the queer community.
Her great-aunt, Ethel Waters, was a phenom of her time. Originally performing in vaudeville circles as a young woman, she would grow to become the first African-American performer with her own TV show, the first African-American woman to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award, and the second African-American woman to be nominated for an Academy Award.
But before she was a pioneering star of stage and screen, she was a singer. After finding bits of success in Chicago and Atlanta in her younger years, Waters moved to Harlem in 1919, just at the break of the Harlem Renaissance. She was one of the first Black women to ever make a record when she recorded with Cardinal Records, a small, fleeting label, before joining Black Swan alongside many of her Renaissance contemporaries.
Though she married men multiple times, Waters did not hide her bisexuality in her Harlem years. While performing in the ’20s, she developed a romantic relationship with a dancer named Ethel Williams. The couple, known as “the Two Ethels”, lived together in a Manhattan residence now recognized as an LGBT Historic Site.
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Her musical legacy by itself is formidable. She originated enduring jazz standards like “Stormy Weather” and “Heat Wave” and brought gospel hymn “His Eye is on the Sparrow” into the mainstream. She’s attributed 25 different top 40 hits between 1921 and 1938, before the popular concept of the charting “Top 40” even existed.
It would be too great an undertaking to extol all of her accomplishments here; one would need a full biography for that. Instead, we’ll let her timeless voice speak — or sing — for itself.
Flash back with us to the debut of “Stormy Weather”:
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